Articles

Neural interfaces are easy to prototype and hard to manufacture reliably. The difference between a promising device and a usable chronic implant is often packaging, process control, and failure analysis.

This chapter is a reality check: what tends to fail, why hermetics matter, and why manufacturability should shape the design early.

Packaging is the device

In chronic implants, packaging often dominates:

• corrosion from water ingress,
• delamination and cracking,
• connector failures,
• and unpredictable impedance drift.

If you don’t have a credible packaging story, you don’t have a chronic device.

Microfabrication and tolerances

Microfabrication can produce exquisite geometry, but repeatability and yield matter. A design that depends on a fragile process step will be expensive and unreliable.

References (starter)

• Implantable device packaging overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implantable_medical_device

(We’ll add implant packaging reviews and hermeticity standards references next.)